This week involves an ever-increasing whirl of activity with little prospect of a respite. It's Spring Break for Humboldt State University. I was looking forward to an empty, quiet office where I could concentrate on relieving my desk of stacks of paper and much overdue filing. Not to be. Linnea's accordion which had been damaged somehow (we have no indication of how this happened - she hasn't touched it in 2 months since her shoulder surgery). I took a look inside to see if I could see what was wrong. We contacted accordion repair people locally, in Seattle, San Francisco and Salt Lake City. We finally found that the repair was a MAJOR undertaking and the only person to fix it who could get to it right away was in SLC. So Tuesday we drove to San Fran. Flew to SLC Wednesday morning. Took it to the accordion doctor. Got it fixed while shopping for a backup accordion. Had dinner with my dad, brother and nephew. Flew back Thursday morning to SF and drove home.

Now we are planning for the Arcata International Folk Dance Festival with much coming and going of musician friends and comrades.
No rest for now.

This is my first attempt at a blog. There seem to be any number of tracts to take, but the two most obvious ones are 1) stream of consciousness and 2) ranting and raving about the state of the world. Hm. I wonder if these really aren't the same.

The World

I've always been an anti-war, left-wing, godless, socialist. I cannot understand how the neoconservatives in the U.S. believe they will win out in the end. Every power who has
tried to rule others by force of arms eventually fails and must give up with a loss of credibility and prestige. The neocon agenda of securing all the oil this country uses is
bound to have bad consequences. The backlash will drive strategic opponents together and alienate our allies, as it already has. I'm hoping the hydrogen-based economy will
outpace all of this and save us from a huge calamity, a third world war over resource control.

It appalls me how huge amounts of money go to Halliburton and Bechtel with little sign of progress. How can FEMA and the Red Cross be so incompetent in dealing with hurricane victims? The Bush Administration has made errors at every turn. The Clinton Administration warned them about the signs leading to 9/11. The FBI refused to heed warnings within the bureau. Attacking the Taliban and putting Osama on the run were the only things Bush got right, but after that nothing. U.S. armed forces should have been concentrated in Afghanistan, making the country secure and deposing the warlords.
Instead, Afghanistan, which was the primary front against the terrorists, gets shifted to the back burner, and a pointless war is instigated against Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction, no welcome liberation, no plan, no success. I really believe that there was chicanery in both of the 2000 and 2004 elections, where the deciding factor goes to a Bush-brother-run-state and a Bush-supporter-voting-machine-run state.

My life

My life is a most comfortable one. I live with an intelligent, beautiful, caring woman. We have no money problems. We don't drown ourselves in material things, and are frugal in most things, but we don't deprive ourselves. We need to improve our social life. During the winter months here, it's so dark and rainy and cold, it's hard to get motivated to go out, especially if we have a nice fire, and I get cooking in the kitchen. I'm such a habituated person, it's easy to get into a rut, but it's comfortable, so abrupt change is unlikely.